Take Control
by fc2001
Summary: I learned long ago that you cannot control everything in your life.... Neelacentric, post Strange Bedfellows


**Notes**: This practically clobbered me over the head in the shower today – which was not only painful, but potentially dangerous.

**Spoilers **: Up to and including 12.18 "Strange Bedfellows" Which I haven't seen. I'm extrapolating from screencaps, and my own imagination, and the thread at FanForum.

**Content Warning **: Nothing

**Disclaimer**: ER and its characters are the property of Michael Crichton, John Wells, Amblin Entertainment and Constant C Productions. No infringement intended and these characters are used within without permission.

**Take Control**

I learned long ago that you cannot control everything in your life.

What you have to do is take control of the things that you can, and hope the rest will fall into place.

After all, you can never control how someone else feels.

How someone else reacts.

I have learned to control the things I can.

I control the little things – like getting up on time each morning, and keeping myself looking clean and tidy. Things like making sure I eat well enough and drink enough water in a day.

Things like making sure I take vitamins and go for a run at least twice a week.

I can control not running out of milk. I can control paying the utility bills and making sure I have hot water. I can control making sure the laundry is done.

What I have not yet learned to control are my feelings, my impulses, my instincts.

My neuroses.

That's why I had to move out. I was controlling what I could. I was taking the only definitive action I could to put enough space between us. I had to take a step back before I could even begin to figure out where my next step forward would be.

Because the intensity of what was happening frightened me.

I feared for myself and I feared for him. I feared for us and what would have happened if I had stayed.

I should say I feared for my marriage. But my marriage is a sham. A cover.

An excuse.

My loyalty to my husband is the shield behind which I hide.

What I'm feeling, have felt, recently hasn't exactly hit me like a bolt from the blue. There's been something building for a long time.

A natural chemistry that I've learned doesn't come along very often.

I moved out because I don't want it to flash and pass. I don't want it to be a short-lived fling.

I don't want him to be the affair that ends my marriage. He deserves more than that.

I have no control over the way I feel about him. Nor the way he clearly feels about me. The combination of those two sets of emotions tilted my whole world on its axis.

It threw me completely off balance – if only on the inside.

There was a moment. A moment where if I had spoken, I could have altered the course of things to come irretrievably. If I had said what I wanted, and he needed to hear, things would have been very different now.

But you can't act in the heat of the moment like that.

You can't act when you don't know which way is up and which is down.

Decisions made like that only end up causing more hurt.

It may not seem like it now, but getting in that taxi really was the best thing to do. He won't understand, in the short term it will be hard to get past the rejection.

The fact that he laid himself on the line, bared himself in a way he'd never been brave enough to do before, and still I left.

I have no control over the fact that ever since I got to Abby's, he's the only thing that's been on my mind.

It may seem crazy to have walked away. But this is control. I keep reminding myself of this, alone in this relatively unfamiliar apartment that isn't quite my own.

This is space and distance and breathing space. This is stopping the intensity of it burning us both up. This is preserving fidelity and allowing my marriage to end for less than sordid reasons.

I will sleep tonight in a bed that isn't mine. In a place I can't call home. And I hope that in the morning I will know.

If my instincts were right all along.

That if, deep down, it really has always been him.


End file.
